Former Cleveland Mayor Michael White chases, and catches, a new dream in the country (photo gallery)

The road into the Appalachian hills above Newcomerstown winds past rural marvels. A deer farm. A herd of Zebras. An Amish boy clop-clopping along in a horse-drawn buggy.

One more spectacle awaits at the crest of Blue Ridge Road, where a bright yellow barn leaps into view. This is the tasting room of Yellow Butterfly Winery, the newest addition to a fledging regional wine trail.

Inside, on a wood-plank bar polished to a high shine, Michael White uncorks his wines and pours samples for tourists, who turn and drink in the beauty of a remarkable restoration and the uncommon farm beyond. Just as the neighbors do.

"He rebuilt that old barn and he made it really neat. Ha!" exclaimed Lee Wyse, a local farmer who runs a winery three miles down the road. "He's got alpacas grazing out back. Not only that, he's got some wines on the market that have done well."

Wyse, a former Coshocton County commissioner, chuckled and said, "Mike's nobody's slouch. He's a real addition to Appalachia."

Michael R. White, the mayor who reshaped Cleveland, did not break stride when he reached the countryside. He simply embraced a new landscape. One lofty stretch of rural Ohio may never be the same.

Ten years after disappearing from public life and big-city power, Cleveland's longest serving mayor is the new darling of the Three Rivers Wine Trail. He's ankle deep in alpaca feed and horse manure. He's the friendly face greeting cars and the occasional tour bus, with a visage that makes some visitors ask, "Don't we know you from somewhere?"

At 61, White looks fit and agile in blue jeans and a ball cap, though his grizzled beard is more white than black. He says he's relaxed and happy on a hilltop farm ceaseless with work. He's also vexed that people seem astonished by his transformation. They wonder if he misses the life he left.

To be fair to the curious and the skeptical, the makeover is almost unbelievable. For 12 years, White was the hard-charging leader of a major city on a comeback, one of the most dynamic mayors in America. He erected stadiums, saved the Browns, assumed command of a troubled city school system and warred with anyone perceived to have crossed him.

By the time he announced he was quitting political life in 2001, stunning the community, White faced an army of detractors. Still, he was widely considered a lock for a fourth term.

Surprise at his exit turned to incredulity when it was learned he would move to Tuscarawas County, 90 miles south of Cleveland, and raise alpacas. The theories and rumors grew darker in 2005, when Nate Gray, White's friend and confidant, was convicted of taking bribes to steer public contracts during White's administration.

Mike Tobin, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Cleveland, would not confirm or deny whether the ex-mayor was ever investigated for corruption, adding, "We never comment on those sorts of things."

White, who was never charged with a crime, scoffs at the idea that he could escape the long arm of the law by moving three counties away. He insists he never betrayed the public trust and calls the insinuations mean-spirited and ridiculous.

"Further comment from me about this would only dignify rubbish," he said.

He moved to the country with his wife, JoAnn, because that's where they both wished to live, he says. A transition that appears abrupt was in the works for years.

Some say the re-making of Michael White the mayor to Michael White the farmer was at least plausible, almost predictable. So, maybe, were the results.

A second life's dream

A hard rain had just drenched Yellow Butterfly Winery and its hay fields parched by drought. White, his work shoes caked with mud, walked among his rows of traminette and vidal vines and tried to explain why he so likes his new life.

He cupped bunches of green grapes and turned over rain-splattered leaves, looking for insects and brown spots, for tell-tale signs of trouble in a young vineyard. Not that he could tarry long to right anything. There was livestock to feed and hay bails to stack. He was hoping his Amish handyman would show up and fix a clogged septic line.

"This is as loud as it gets here," he said. "I love Cleveland. I enjoyed being mayor. I would do it all again. But for me, this is where I've decided I want to spend the rest of my life."

Eyes widening, he declared, "I've never regretted it, not one day or night. Not even the day I got every piece of machinery stuck in the snow."

The son of a machinist and a secretary, White grew up on the city's east side. By the time he was 13, he says, he knew he wanted to be mayor of his hometown and he knew he wanted to one day work a farm.

That summer, the Cleveland School District sponsored demonstration farms and White immersed himself in the program, beginning a long, clandestine love affair with the good earth.

While he earned his degree in public administration from Ohio State University, White says, his first major was agriculture. He was typically the only minority in classes filled with farmer's sons.

White dove into public service after college, getting back to Cleveland as soon as he could. He served as a city councilman and a state senator before realizing his dream, in 1989, and being elected mayor.

He always found solace in gardening, going so far as to install a street light above his Glenville yard so he could work in the dark after long days at City Hall.

A gardener does not a farmer make, of course, and White says he was thinking only of a weekend escape in the late 1990s when he and JoAnn bought a hilly, 45-acre farm deep in the countryside near the border of Tuscarawas and Coshocton counties.

"We just fell in love with the place. The beauty. The tranquility," White explained.

Soon after leaving public life, he and JoAnn moved permanently to a farm they named Seven Pines, where they had built a house.

Soon after that, the Michael White focus and intensity took over.

"He puts his all into everything he does," said State Sen. Nina Turner, who served in White's cabinet in the 1990s. She laughed to imagine her mentor and former boss breeding mini lamas and pitchforking hay.

"People didn't get to see that side of him while he was rebuilding the city," she said. "He's always been interested in agriculture. I think right now he's fulfilling the other side of himself."

By 2002, White and his wife had begun raising alpacas, which are gentle, smaller cousins of the lama and are prized for their silky soft fleece.

"Basically, we were looking for livestock that we would not have to kill," White explained in the logic of the gentleman farmer.

The herd grew to two dozen animals, all bred, raised and named by the Whites.

White had left office with a $1 million campaign fund that could be invested in charity. He and JoAnn decided to create a refuge for abused and unwanted horses. They built a 10-horse stable and corrals for the Seven Pines Foundation, which rehabilitates horses and puts them up for adoption.

A once-fallow farm now stirred with life, but White wasn't done. For years, he had been making wine and handing out bottles as gifts to friends and customers. A hobby mushroomed into another passion.

In the spring of 2009, the Whites bought the 35-acre farm next door. Around that time, Lee Wyse recalls, White approached him with an audacious idea.

"He said he wanted to start a winery, like, right now," recalled Wyse, who runs Rainbow Hills Winery with his wife, Joy. "He wanted to know, 'How do I start. What do I do?' "

Wyse chuckled. "There's a little bit of a transition from mayor of Cleveland to winery owner. He handled it well."

Wyse is most impressed with the transformation of a cavernous, 88-year-old dairy barn into a rustic, gleaming wine bar.

"There was 10 feet of manure in that basement," Wyse declared. "They had to dig it out with pick and shovel."

White and his lone full-time employee, Rick Lindsay, did much of the gruntwork. Craftsmen were hired to re-lay the massive slate roof and to install the restaurant deck outside.

Old and new friends invested in a project that included a cantina for mixing and blending grape juices and the planting of a vineyard, toward the day when White will run an estate winery, one that bottles its own grapes.

But the signature piece is the bright yellow barn, which looms like a sunflower above the Blue Ridge Valley. Suddenly, a promising wine trail had a tourist attraction.

Living in two worlds

"Beautiful," exclaimed Laura Hall of Kent, as she walked into the tasting barn on a recent afternoon and looked up and all around. She and her friends in the insurance business, Vicky Kuecher of Strasburg and Cindy Jones of Canal Fulton, had taken a holiday from work and followed winding Blue Ridge Road up to the crest.

"I like that it's off the beaten path," Hall said. "The view's gorgeous!"

White said hello and asked where they were from. He snapped a photograph for the winery's Facebook page and left the trio in the care of Lindsay, who was running the tasting bar.

There were chores to be done and a crisis or three to address.

The cell phone clipped to his belt shrilled and White looked at the number and said, "Now you'll hear what I do all day."

Speaking into the phone, he said, "Hello Andy, I'm hoping you can take a look at that septic line."

The Whites move in and out of parallel worlds. JoAnn, the program manager for the Mandel Foundation in downtown Cleveland, drives into the city about three times a week. Michael, a consultant to the Mandel foundation and to some non-profit groups and businesses, comes in about once a week. He says he can make the drive in 90 minutes. More challenging is the shift in cultures.

Two years ago, when a neighbor's house caught fire, White found himself holding the hose while volunteer firefighters directed the spray.

"It's different here," he said. "Everybody pitches in. I had to learn to wave."

He still gets approached to run for political office, requests he always turns down. That part of his life is over, he said, and he's long since made peace with that.

"You know, a lot of people live their whole life doing one thing, and that's fine," White said. "But when you can chase a dream -- even after living your dream -- that is a blessing."

He and JoAnn have four children from previous marriages, and he hopes one of them feels the desire to one day take over the farm, the herd, the winery, the whole sprawling operation. Maybe they'll want that, he muses. Maybe when they get to a point in their lives when they find in the land what he does.

Alpacas are social, curious creatures with long necks and cartoonishly big eyes. When one fluffy white alpaca saw the familiar man with the feed bucket, the others turned to follow.

"They're starting to get their winter coats on," White observed, wading into the herd with a surprise snack. "Isn't that right Annie?"

The animals swarmed around him like a happy sorority, flashing long lashes and humming in excitement, the bolder ones bobbing toward the bucket.